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This doesn’t only apply to technology. It applies to hiring and other organizational processes as well.

• SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  e.g. "the spotify model"
• rossdavidh 8y ago
  Rings true. I once worked a contract at a place with proprietary hardware, that wanted their software extras to be purchased separately, and accessible through an "app store". This seemed to imply they thought somebody else would develop apps for their store, which was odd because if their proprietary hardware (which was quite expensive, justifiably so) sold 1000 units it would be considered successful. Basically nobody made apps for their app store except the people who worked for the same company that made the hardware, and I had a hard time understanding why they didn't use the (much simpler) model of "if you pay us $X more we'll throw in this bit of software". Instead, they had to develop all of the software for running and maintaining an app store, including the issues of making sure that apps uploaded to their store were not malware. Then, I realized what was going on: Apple had introduced their app store a few years before, and it was a big deal. Steve Jobs was the CEO on the cover of every magazine. The CEO looked at Apple, and said, "we must have an app store", and that was all there was to it, even though Apple sold several orders of magnitude more units, making the concept of an app store way more suitable for them than for the company I was working for.